Oblivion
by southspinner
Summary: In which Jean Kirschtein is a self-proclaimed pretentious douchebag with an abiding love for metaphors and unlit cigarettes, Marco Bodt is an obscure novel addict who realizes that everything is a side effect of dying, and the two of them fall into what is not so much a story about cancer as a story about love, because everyone knows that cancer books suck. [TFiOS AU]


"_We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will." _

__Chuck Palahniuk_

Perfect friendships are overrated. I always found that I couldn't trust the idea of friends that didn't hate each other at least a little bit of the time, found the idea of it to be empty and vapid and a little bit contrived. Friendship should be like life, I reasoned - ugly, gritty, none of the storybook bullshit with walking off into the sunset holding hands and basking in the unique glow of your platonic soulmate.

When I first met Eren Jaeger, we were both thirteen years old, sitting in chairs next to each other in a white, sterile room at Trost Memorial as a cocktail of chemicals with seven-syllable-long names dripped into our arms. Names and diagnoses on our wristbands like prison tattoos, but he didn't even bother to spare a glance at _Jean Kirschtein, Osteosarcoma_ before glaring over at me, one blue eye, one brown, glassy, unnatural one. "What are you looking at?"

I took a quick look down at _Eren Jaeger, Some Complicated Eye Cancer I Can't Remember The Name Of_ and replied with a saccharine smile, "More than you are, I'd bet." And that's how we became the very first fistfight in Memorial's pediatric oncology ward.

Fast forward four years to age seventeen, and somewhere along the way, I'd lost a leg, Eren was a week from losing his other eye, and we'd gained some warped sort of dynamic that couldn't really be called _friendship_ in most circles but which worked for us just as well as everyone else's tired relationship tropes.

My phone went off at nine in the morning on a Saturday (a goddamn _Saturday_) with an unholy shriek, and I pawed at my bedside table, half-conscious until I brought the hunk of sleep-defiling plastic up to my ear. "I'll fucking kill you."

"Good morning to you too, asshole," Eren sighed, a vague crackle across speakers and signals and satellites orbiting miles above the Earth. "Come to Support Group with me this afternoon."

"No."

"Jean-"

"No," I groaned, rolling away from the light blasting my face as it filtered around the curtain pulled over the sliding glass door on the other side of my room, consciousness screaming through my head like a hateful little banshee. "In case you missed the memo, I'm in remission. I've got better things to do with my day than hang out with you and the Chemo Club talking about our feelings."

A raspy laugh. "Better things to do. Like what?"

"Like sleeping, which I was doing like all other normal seventeen-year-old boys on a Saturday morning before you called asking me to tag along with you to what is possibly the most depressing thing in existence."

"My mom makes me go. The least you could do is ensure that I don't have to go alone," he whined, and I could almost see him, blue eye rolling upwards, brown glass one staying creepily in place. "Solidarity, man."

"Why would I give you anything resembling solidarity? You're a prick," I replied acidly, sitting up and rubbing the sleep from my eyes with the heel of my hand. "A prick who borrowed my new copy of Mass Effect 3 a month ago and hasn't returned it so I can actually play the game yet."

"Come to Support Group and I'll give you the game back after you leave, deal?"

"That's not a deal, you fucker, that's extortion."

"Jeaaaaaaaan."

"No."

Eight hours later, I was sitting in a cold, tiled church basement in an uncomfortable molded-plastic chair two seats down from Eren Jaeger, feeling like I'd come some sort of fucked up full-circle from the first day I ever met him. Instead of printed plastic bracelets, our name and diagnoses work-camp brands were written in our own penmanship on cheery little nametags, which somehow made the situation all the more depressing. Hi, My Name Is: Reiner, and the very lifeblood in my veins is trying to kill me. Smiley face in the lower right hand corner. Hi, My Name Is: Annie, and I've been shitting into this colostomy bag you can see outlined under my shirt for about a year now because of my traitorous colon. Cheery flowers penned in across the top. Group Leader Erwin had said something when we came in about being in the literal heart of Jesus, but all I got was the harrowing feeling that I was sitting in Death's waiting room.

A basement full of watered-down lemonade, stale cookies, and a bunch of kids with cancer. We were one punchline or headline away from being an insensitive stand-up routine or heartbreaking local cable news feature.

I sat and watched the miserable parade. A merry-go-round of emaciated bodies and sunken, tired eyes filling one seat after another until we all sat looking at each other in an uncomfortable silence.

"So," said Group Leader Erwin like this was an exciting game show instead of a roundtable for the kids you see plastered on the spare change jars next to the registers at fast food joints. "I think we should start with-"

The door opened mid-sentence, a resonant, metallic clang that drowned out the mutters and wheezes and phlegmy coughs from the diseased peanut gallery. Bang. Echo, echo. Creak, creak, creak. Symbolically enough and fitting in with my general view of the situation, I saw the oxygen tank first. Dented and worn, one wheel creaking on its axle, obviously the outlet of abuse from someone who resented toting it around. The tank led to a clear plastic hose, which led to a split section and a nosepiece, which led to a guy who looked roughly my age, if a little worse for wear. Dark hair, big doe-like eyes, lots of freckles. Cute.

He seemed to feel everyone's eyes on him, curled in on himself slightly as he snatched a cookie off the table and shuffled over to the last empty seat, three down from me. Group Leader Erwin cleared his throat and picked right back up where he left off, although my attention had faltered somewhere between his recount of cancer taking his nads but giving him a new perspective and every day being a gift or some such fuckery. Instead, I looked intently at the boy who'd come in late, fiddling with the handle of his oxygen tank cart and drumming fingertips on the knee of faded blue jeans to some inaudible beat. He was looking the other way; it took a moment to figure out exactly where his line of sight was aimed. The clock. I let out a small snort that was half amusement and half appreciation, and the sound made him turn around, holding eye contact with me for a second before looking pointedly away again.

A challenge. Also, I was bored. So I kept staring at Freckles as the clock ticked out an odd syncopation to the timed hiss of his oxygen tank dispersing its contents, the drone of some sermon about making the most out of what you have fading steadily into the background until he finally turned his head and looked back at me. A crooked almost-smile settled on my lips. He raised an eyebrow. I grinned a little wider. He rolled his brown eyes up towards the ceiling and looked away again.

And everything came back into focus starting with two familiar syllables. "Eren, why don't you start? You mentioned that you were having a bit of a tough time."

Yeah, because having one of your senses ripped away constituted a tough time. I could practically see the murder coming off Eren's skin in waves, but he'd been here long enough to know the routine, painted on a plastic smile that even almost fooled me, stood up and gave everyone a breezy wave. "Yeah, hi, I'm Eren. And, uh… I guess I'm having surgery in a week that's going to make me blind. But on the upside, I apparently won't have cancer anymore. So, yeah."

Group Leader Erwin nodded gravely like this was some sort of progress, steepling his fingers and saying, "I acknowledge your struggle, Eren. Come on, guys, let him hear it."

"We acknowledge your struggle, Eren," the group sighed collectively.

"You've got to be _shitting _me," I muttered under my breath, apparently loudly enough to carry to three seats down, because Freckles gave an undignified snort of a laugh, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards despite what seemed a valiant effort. I caught his eye again, nodding at our general surroundings as if to ask, _Is this for real?_

He snorted again, mouth settling into a grimace as if to reply, _Unfortunately, yeah._

I went ahead and decided that even if the rest of this hellish hour had no other bright spots, I'd at least met a kindred spirit who shared my low tolerance for bullshit.

"New face, okay, let's hear from you."

I put on a big, plastic smile that matched Eren's. The one you learn for your family's sake when they ask you if you're feeling okay and you lie, pretend that the chemo doesn't make your whole body ache and that you can't feel yourself dying cell by cell. I'd gotten good enough at it over the years that I didn't even have to try as I stretched my arms out and leaned my chair back on its rear legs. "Jean Kirschtein. Seventeen. Osteosarcoma. As far as you're all concerned, those are probably the only four words that matter. I've been in remission for a year, but a certain dumbass suffering from a crisis of impending blindness brought me along as his security blanket today."

Eren laughed. Everyone else looked vaguely uncomfortable. Group Leader Erwin looked like he had absolutely no fucking idea what to make of me. Good. As a formerly-diseased teenage tragedy with one leg and more disenchantment than a human body was probably designed to hold, being an enigma was about the best thing I had going for me. "And how are you feeling?"

"Oh, I'm fantastic," I drawled, raking a hand through my hair and tilting my head back to look at the dingy whorls of the ceiling paint. "Life as a cripple, debt that will drive my parents to early graves, but hey, I get to keep kicking with one foot for seventy more years, give or take. I'm downright blinded with gratitude."

"Shut up, you ass," Eren snapped.

"Oh, come on, Eren, you should have seen that one coming." By no coincidence judging by the look I got, we moved on to the next introduction rather quickly after that.

Annie was sixteen with Stage III colon cancer, and she was feeling self-conscious about her poo bag, as per usual. Thomas should have probably been in a hospital instead of at Support Group, and he was purportedly feeling fine. I knew the look after years of hospital trips. He wouldn't be attending next week's session. Or any session. Ever again.

Freckles fiddled with his tank again, eyes on the floor. "Marco." And now he had a name. "I'm seventeen. Thyroid, and metastases in the lungs. I'm okay."

And after we'd all read off our prison tattoos for everyone else, we dove right in. A whole hour of listening to sob stories I knew too well because I'd lived them, every ticking fraction of the clock making me despise Eren a little more for dragging me into this. By the time we were down to fifteen agonizing more minutes, I was almost to the conclusion that no video game was worth this. Ilse, eighteen, Stage IV liver cancer was scared of dying. We acknowledge your struggle, Ilse. All I acknowledged was that Eren owed me a paid-in-full burrito the size of my head from the Chipotle down the street as soon as we emerged from this hell.

"Jean, we haven't heard from you since we opened up." I wondered how much the Support Group benefactors paid Group Leader Erwin to make us all as uncomfortable as humanly possible. It was by sheer force of willpower alone that I didn't give any of them the satisfaction of seeing me cringe. "Let's go with Ilse's train of thought and talk about your fears. What are you afraid of?"

What was I afraid of? Namely the fact that my asshole best friend had forgotten to bring my game with him and this entire sad affair had been for nothing. But snark would earn me more scrutiny than compliance, so I tried to dig deep, I really did. What was I afraid of? Lots of little things, but mainly-

"Oblivion," I finally said decisively, looking at the chewed stubs of my fingernails and trying to get the cloyingly sweet, gritty taste of poorly mixed powdered lemonade off the backs of my teeth.

Group Leader Erwin blinked once, twice. "All right, that's a good topic to start some conversation. Oblivion?"

"Oblivion. The fact that one day we're all going to fly into the sun and evaporate, and nothing that the human race ever accomplished will matter." For all my fear of it, my voice was almost bored as I clarified the definition. "And I am absolutely petrified of-"

"That's a stupid thing to be scared of," a soft voice floated over the top of mine, and a collective head turn left the attention focused on Freckles - Marco - who immediately sprouted a pink flush across the sickly pallor of his cheekbones before continuing. "You act like Oblivion is some sort of great big unknown. And it's just… not. The reality of it has always been here. It's always been a fact that one day we're all going to fly into the sun and evaporate. It's not new information. A time comes when all of us become aware of it. Oblivion's not some monster under the bed for you to be scared of. It just… is."

The room was silent with the sound of people not getting it. A slow, wide smile stretched across my face. "Well damn, that's a good bit of philosophy. Tell me, why shouldn't I be scared of Oblivion?"

Marco tilted his head slightly, eyes narrowing like he wasn't sure of whether or not I was patronizing him. Actually, I wasn't sure of whether or not I was patronizing him. "Because it's an inevitability."

"So is death. Should we not fear that, either?"

Eventually the silence gave way to other fears, other stories, other tears, but Marco kept looking at me across the circle with that uncertain expression, lean arms crossed over his chest. I held his gaze evenly, letting him take what he would from the whole exchange. What I took from it was that he had an interesting sort of symmetry to the smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks that tended towards entropy as they moved outwards, fanning out across his forehead and chin, even a few on his lips. It seemed impossible that someone could have so many without having some sort of weird skin condition, but I didn't see any melanoma on his prison tattoo nametag. Just the thyroid and mets in the lungs. Curious.

I didn't bow my head during the closing prayer. Flaunting my atheism in the House of the Lord seemed like a good way for the ceiling to cave in on my sinful head, but the risk was a better option than pretending to be something other than what I was. Eren had always been religious against his own better judgment, mumbled along like a good little sycophant beside me. They say that if terminal illness can't bring a person to God's loving bosom, nothing can. Well, I dodged that bullet, not that I was ever under the delusion that any higher power would want something to do with me. It's a lot easier to make your way through the world as a very pretentious, very prideful, very gay individual without having to answer to some moderator in the sky. Somewhere amidst that train of thought, I looked across the circle and noticed that Marco wasn't prostrating himself before the Almighty either. I raised an eyebrow. He gave me a silent, challenging look, daring me to say something. I replied with a little half-smirk that said I wouldn't dream of it. We stayed in that little standoff until everyone was dismissed.

"So is that one here all the time?" I asked Eren after, grabbing him by the arm before he got into anyone else's range of hearing.

He frowned in confusion, following my line of sight and starting to answer before a look of horror crossed his face. "Yeah, he showed up the week after I… No. Jean, _no._"

"No, what?"

"No, I'm not going to let you try to get a date at a _cancer support group,_" he hissed, looking at me like I was some sort of barbarian for even thinking of it. "That's twisted even for you."

I laughed, genuinely amused. "I love when you glare at me. The expression only conveys through one eye and the asymmetry is hilarious."

"And you walk like a fucking Weeble, but you don't see me saying anything about it," Eren spat back, shoving past me and going to bitterly nurse a Dixie cup of lemonade. "Fine, go make a fool of yourself. Dick."

"Don't recall ever asking for your permission to do such," I replied breezily, wandering my way over to where Marco was stooped over trying to adjust something on his oxygen tank.

"You know," I started, "You're probably the first person who's ever told me that my fears were stupid."

His lips pursed into a thin line, the only indication that he even acknowledged my presence. "Sorry."

"No, don't be. I think it's something everyone needs to hear once in a while."

"It was just a weird thing to say, is all." Marco had a peculiar set to his shoulders, a different way of carrying himself that probably had something to do with compensating for the unwieldy addition of the tank he dragged along behind him as he headed for the door. "People don't typically talk about what terrifies them with a shit-eating grin on their face."

"Well. You know. 'Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head,'" I shrugged, snatching a cookie off the table as we passed.

He stopped, turned around to look at me. "What?"

My jaw dropped. "Chuck Palahniuk? _Fight Club?_ Are you not familiar with it? It's a literary masterpiece."

"Never heard of it."

"Blasphemy!"

"I read weird books, okay, I'm not exactly stocking my shelves off the New York Times Bestseller list," Marco replied a little defensively, eyes narrowing as he gave his tank a sharp tug and made for the door.

"Hey, hey, no, I wasn't implying that you're any less intellectual for your ignorance of the fact that Palahniuk's a god. I was only - oh, give me a second," I rushed out, crossing in front of him and snagging Eren by the back of the shirt before he could get out the door. "My game, Jaeger. That was our agreement. And this was far more depressing than you made it out to be. I want extra compensation."

"You get the extra compensation of me not kicking your ass," he growled, pulling a plastic case out of his backpack and shoving it into my chest before stalking up the stairs.

"We've been best friends since we were twelve." I explained. Marco nodded slowly.

"So why did you keep giving me that weird look after our Oblivion conversation?" he asked suddenly.

I gave him the aforementioned look again. "How easily offended are you, Marco?"

"Not very."

"Because you're beautiful in a very strange way, and you were far more interesting than anything else going on in that excuse for a coping mechanism." The statement was delivered with a shrug, simple and honest.

He blinked. "I'm not seeing the punchline here."

"That's because Eren's not around. When I tell a joke, he usually ends up being the punchline."

"No, really, I don't-"

"You know, they made _Fight Club_ into a movie. If nothing else, it's got a young, shirtless Brad Pitt in it."

"I'll look it up," Marco sighed, starting up the stairs seemingly without caring whether or not I followed him, although he didn't protest when I did.

"Or you could come over and watch it with me. We've got a home theater. Very nice. Surround sound." Shameless, really. I could practically hear the sound of Eren's palm colliding with his forehead inside my mind.

"I just met you," he wheezed, halfway up the stairs and sounding painfully winded. I stood in the middle of the stairwell and waited as his breath caught up with him and he fixed me with an incredulous look. "You could be some sort of weirdo."

"Oh, I assure you, I'm definitely some sort of weirdo," I grinned, climbing up the stairs and holding the exit door open for him, which earned me a glare for whatever reason.

The parking lot was mostly empty, the last few stragglers piling into their parents cars as we walked out into the beginnings of a sunset over the horizon of suburban asphalt. It was almost a serene environment, or rather it would have been if not for the hideous sucking sounds coming from Eren and a curvy, raven-haired silhouette that had him pinned against the wall of the church.

"I understand that he wants to look at Mikasa as much as he can before next week, but _really,_" I shook my head, watching the two of them fumble around for a bit before turning back to look at Marco. "Your ride not here yet?"

He shook his head, staring with a slight sort of distaste at the writhing silhouettes in the corner. "That's kind of gross."

"Young love. Beautiful, unique, and vaguely disgusting," I agreed, pulling a pack of Marlboro Reds out of the pocket of the worn leather jacket thrown over my shoulder and perching the cylinder between my lips.

The look on Marco's face went from slight distaste to revulsion. "Are you _kidding me_ right now?! What, do you think that makes you look like a badass or something?! That is utterly _repulsive!_ God, you've just completely ruined this!"

"Completely ruined it?" I asked, smirking crookedly. "Completely?"

"Yes, completely! Christ on a crutch, I meet a cute guy who likes supposedly good literature and isn't unintelligent and you have to go and ruin it. You _had cancer,_ Jean, are you really going to funnel a bunch of your own money into a Russian Roulette game to get _more cancer_ because of a stupid aesthetic that isn't nearly as attractive as people make it out to be?! News flash, pal, lung cancer _blows._" The grip around the handle of his oxygen tank was white-knuckled, and for a second, I was almost afraid that I was about to get clocked in the head by a skinny, freckled, adorable boy in a green sweater who looked just about angry enough to snap me in half.

"You think I'm cute?" I asked, which earned me a loud half-scream of frustration and Marco turning around to storm off before he could see me grinning like an absolute idiot. I wasn't exactly a ball of insecurities, but being called attractive by an attractive person was always a good ego boost. Eren always told me that I had a horse face and stupid hair that was a gross dishwater blonde and too messy for its own good, but beauty criticism from someone with a mismatched glass eye sort of demanded to be taken with a grain of salt.

"I did!" Marco fumed, stalking towards a minivan driven by a pretty, middle-aged woman with dark hair and freckles that absolutely confirmed she was his mother. Laughing, I reached down and grabbed his wrist before he could yank the door handle, watching him whirl around in a huff.

"Marco. You do realize I haven't lit it yet, right?" I asked.

"What?" he said.

"I don't ever light one. That's not what it's about," I explained, the cigarette still dangling from my lips. "They can't hurt you if you don't light them It's an exercise in power. You put something with the power to kill you right between your lips, but it can't do anything unless you let it."

Marco's jaw slackened, a look of disbelief settling hard in his eyes. "So it's…"

"A metaphor, yeah," I nodded.

"That is without a doubt the most pretentious thing I've ever heard in my life."

"I never claimed it wasn't," I shrugged, noting that he hadn't yanked his hand away yet. "You know now that I'm not a smoker. However, if me being a pretentious douchebag with an abiding love for metaphors is going to be a deal breaker, we might have a problem."

Marco rapped on his mom's passenger side window, waited for her to roll it down. "I'm going to go watch a movie with Jean Kirschtein. I'll be home by ten."

I reminded myself to tell Eren later that trolling for dates at a cancer support group, while twisted, had the potential to be very successful.


End file.
